The Symbolic and the Embodied in Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

Identificator

EDN: SRCFND ; УДК: 1(430)

Authors

Sysolyatin Alexander Andreevich, assistant of the Department of History of Philosophy, Philosophical Anthropology, Aesthetics and Theory of Culture, Ural Institute for Humanities, Ural Federal University n. a. the First President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin. Russia, Yekaterinburg. ORCID: 0000-0003-3135-9377. E-mail: lar-how@yandex.ru

Journal

HERALD OF VYATKA STATE UNIVERSITY №4 (158), 2025

Section

PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES

Pages

17-24

Abstract

The article discusses the philosophical issue of whether a text can affect the reader in ways beyond the mere transmission of its conceptual content. Based on Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", it examines the phenomenon of the liminal text that seeks to transform not only consciousness but also the reader's mode of existence. The central problem is the contradiction between the sign-based nature of philosophical discourse and the tendency of liminal text to bodily impact its reader. The article analyzes the specificity of Nietzsche's understanding of reading as a process requiring the reader to be "wounded" and "enchanted" by every word of the text. The author demonstrates that the resolution of this contradiction is achieved through the creation of a liminal object that functions simultaneously as a sign structure and as a mode of bodily interaction. The study provides a detailed examination of the dual semantics of the work's key metaphors, the aphoristic writing style, and the performative structure of the text as elements forming the work's particular embodiment. It examines the concept of "great intelligence" and its connection to the possibility of a symbolic relation to the world as an immediate relation. The key finding of the research is the substantiation of the concept of textual corporeality as a special ontological status of the work that transcends the boundaries between the symbolic and the physical. Drawing on Georges Bataille's conceptual apparatus regarding "wound" and "communication", Martin Heidegger's ideas about the "embodiment of life", and theatrical studies of liminality, the author demonstrates that "Zarathustra" realizes a fundamentally new type of philosophical writing where reading becomes a form of bodily event. It is argued that such a text requires mutual disclosure between reader and work, which creates conditions for the emergence of new possibilities of thought and existence.

Keywords

Nietzsche Zarathustra corporeality textuality performativity liminality

Recieved

01.09.2025

Published

08.10.2026

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